Physician Treats Poverty's Ills

Dr. Sherry Brooks Runs Orlando's Homeless Clinic.

Dr. Sherry Brooks thought she had seen every medical condition poverty can dish out after five tours to Central America and the Caribbean in the past eight years.

As a board-certified family practitioner, she treated patients in developing nations for everything from malnutrition and staggeringly high blood pressure to tuberculosis and obstructive lung disease.

Brooks, 49, didn't expect her new job in Orlando to be a case of deja vu. But it is.

As the medical director of the Health Care Center for the Homeless since August, she says she's treating the same maladies - in people right off the city's streets.

The center, which sees homeless people living in and outside of Orlando's shelters, logged 2,400 patient visits in just three months - from July through September. That's about 800 a month - 20 percent of them children.

``The life span of people in the Third World is not much beyond the mid-50s. They're all dead by then,'' she says. ``It's the same here.''

Last year in Guatemala City, Brooks treated people with a host of ailments living in the city's mammoth garbage dump. In Orlando, she treats people who eat out of garbage Dumpsters.

In the Dominican Republic in 1980, she treated people suffering from terrible skin infections and TB. Here, she treats homeless people living in the woods with the same maladies.

In Honduras in 1992 and 1997, she traveled by dugout canoe to treat coastal jungle people - descendants of escapees from American slave ships - for drop-dead blood pressure levels.

``I'd never seen higher blood pressure until I came here,'' says Brooks, a former faculty member for the family practice residency program at Florida Hospital in Orlando. ``And people walk in here with terrible infections.''

People who live in the jungle eat high-fat coconut oil, she says. In Orlando, the homeless eat high-fat fast food. The medical results, Brooks says, are the same.

The challenge, she says, is to teach the homeless how to make good food choices with the resources they have. She gives them an example: Eat fast-food burgers without sauces, condiments or cheese.

If Brooks sounds a bit like a crusader, that's because she is one.

She graduated from medical school at the University of Illinois in 1975 and finished her residency with Kaiser Permanente, a California HMO, three years later. She and her family moved to Orlando 16 years ago, and she went to work for Florida Hospital.

It was the perfect place for someone like Brooks, who ``felt called to go into missions.'' Four of her five trips to developing nations were made through Florida Shares, a hospital foundation that provides medical care to children in emerging countries.

Brooks, who spent 10 days to two weeks each on her Central American trips, says conditions there were tryingly primitive.

``They had no American anything,'' she recalls of her first trip six years ago to a mountain village in Guatemala. ``It was a stone-age culture.''

Brooks, who was accompanied by her two children, then ages 8 and 10, said they ate beans, rice, tortillas and little else. They slept on straw in the town's only ``hotel,'' which was lighted by bare bulbs and candlelight.

The bathroom was a courtyard away, and showers were taken standing under a pipe pouring cold, running water. But the lessons in poverty have served her well.

``My challenge is to fight for the rights of people here to get them the health care they need,'' she said.

Twenty volunteer doctors - including ophthalmologists and dentists - share clinic duty with Brooks, but she says more specialists and hospital vouchers are needed.

The clinic building on the campus of the Coalition for the Homeless in downtown Orlando is bulging at the seams awaiting the move to new quarters on recently purchased property across Parramore Avenue.

And most clinic employees work for less than they would anywhere else because they are committed to the job, Brooks says.

So does she, despite her $100,000 annual salary. Even medical residents these days earn about $130,000 a year, she says.

``It's like doing mission trips, but here [at the clinic) I can go home and lay down on my own bed,'' Books said. ``I don't have to sleep on a straw mattress.''